In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film, Salò, or, the 120 Days of Sodom, was screened at Italian art houses just a few months after the controversial filmmaker was murdered. By that time, Pasolini had distinguished himself as one of the great filmmakers and cultural critics of...
One of the first glimpses of The Social Network came in July, when an early trailer appeared on YouTube. It was a music video of sorts, featuring a children’s choir singing Radiohead’s first single, “Creep,” over images of typical Facebook photos and status updates—the latter...
Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), known in the United States as Everyman for Himself and in the United Kingdom as Slow Motion (on account of its most conspicuous special effect), has just finished a welcome revival at Film Forum. Often hailed as Godard’s...
Welt am Draht (World on a Wire), Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder Few, if any, film careers come close to the star-crossed wonder and terror that was the life and work of German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who burst onto the scene in the late 1960s and who blazed, a baleful,...
The skies in Martin Scorsese’s new film
Shutter Island are one of the most remarkable special effects I’ve ever seen at the cinema: lowering and grey, impenetrably thick, and wholly impassive to human suffering, they’re a perfect doubling, visually and symbolically, of the claustrophobic atmosphere that pervades the film from start to finish.
In the final sequence of Jacques Audiard’s engrossing crime drama, A Prophet, the attentive viewer will notice a deft choice of soundtrack. The tune is a familiar one, Brecht and Weill’s ubiquitous classic “Mack the Knife,” but the rendition is obscure: a droll country...
